Saturday, October 21, 2006

A small team consisting of Romain Legendre, Guillaume Marceau, Danny Yoo, Kathi Fisler and Shriram Krishnamurthi have created a set of alternative keybindings for DrScheme.

DrScheme has always had keybindings that enabled you to work with whole s-expressions. Like Emacs the normal keybindings require a lot of finger gymnastics due to the use of ctrl/alt/shift. Inspired by Vi the DivaScheme bindings are unchorded. Instead of modifier keys, the editor now have two modes: a command/navigation mode and an insert mode. In command mode x is simply bound to cut, where as x in insert mode inserts an x.

DivaScheme has several features that die-hard Emacs-fans will appreciate. For example keyword-completion a la etags from Emacs. The move-by-searching idiom is also supported via the s command.

It is difficult to explain how the keybindings work in practice, bun fortunately Danny Yoo made this little video to introduce DivaScheme: